


Super New Insights

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: Birth Control, Comment Fic, Contraception, F/M, Ficlet, Pregnancy, Roman Catholicism, Stealth Crossover, Vatican II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-11-30
Packaged: 2018-02-27 13:53:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2695445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Claudie came to be a 'sort-of <i>au pair</i>' for the Merricks.</p><p>*</p><p>Content advisory: inexplicit but fairly unmistakable reference to death resulting from continuing with a pregnancy against good sense/medical advice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Super New Insights

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AJHall](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AJHall/gifts).



Helena's life had not been characterised by precipitate or impulsive decisions. In the prehistoric days of Shortly After the War, before becoming the soignée young fiancée of the witty, good-natured young owner of Mariot Chase, she had considered, with a deliberation worthy of the generations of manufacturers and merchants that had formed her unsentimental character and considerable fortune, the social as well as the pecuniary consequences of alliance with such stubborn, splendidly well-bred recusancy. 

Sect was not in itself a problem: Helena's father had undergone a religious conversion when she was small, and his wife and daughter had been received into the Church with him a few years later, when Helena was seven. Helena's childhood sympathies were all with her father's austere, punctilious sincerity; she was scornful alike of her mother's sentimentality and her pronouncements that the Church was so very inconsiderate to women of delicate constitution, these latter always accompanied by meaning (though meaningless, since neither parent had seen fit to equip her with the knowledge that would enable Helena to interpret them) looks at her eldest child. The accord between father and daughter did not, however, survive Helena's fifteenth year and the discovery by Mother Radcliffe of the incomplete manuscript of her first and only novel. Her protests, during that strained interview in the parlour, that its indeterminately reprobate personnel of poets, painters and peers would all, in the as-yet-unwritten last chapter, undergo spectacular conversions, played less of a part in her continued attendance at Lippington than her father's generous donation towards the construction of the new gymnasium block.

It was a relief to find upon her engagement that of the two adjectives invariably applied to Catholics, the Merricks took one extremely seriously and regarded the other as a matter of private conscience: practising non-devotion seemed Helena an eminently sensible approach to religion, and one in which she would be more than happy to bring up the children of the marriage. The remaining stumbling-block lay, in fact, there: issue there must be, she supposed; but frequency would be intolerable. Her mother's death, when Helena was seventeen, had at last acquainted her with the reason for all those significant looks: she wasted no time on guilt over her uncomprehending contempt of her deceased parent, but invested all her energies in ensuring that she would never be in a position to bestow such helplessly self-pitying regard upon her own daughters. In fact, the obstacle was easily surmounted—far more easily so than one of those wretched nags, down whose unsettlingly sleek and thewy necks must be poured ruinous quantities of feed or gentlemanly station be forever forfeit. 

Anthony accepted without demur that the ordeal of coitus required on the distaff side an interval of preparation which was occupied on the spear by two cigarettes and a small brandy; in due course, a son and heir was placed in his arms; to demonstrate any further interest in the matter would fall roughly into the category of _talking about one's insides_ , and if a chap did that, he might as well shut up his stable at once and remove to a villa in Ruislip. Helena underwent some anxious weeks when the boy managed to fling himself off a cliff; there being the concern, in addition to a mother's natural sentiments in such a crisis, that fecundity might once again be required of her; but in the end all was well.

The remark about Friday fish had been meant as a flippancy (though her gratitude at the relaxation of the rule was genuine); she had not expected it to eventuate in her son's semi-articulate, circumlocutory inquisition.

'Pat, what an _appalling_ sentence.'

'Do you, though?' he persisted. He was pale and earnest; how absolutely astonishing, Helena thought, that her blood, the pragmatic blood of confectioners and cotton factors, ran in the veins of a boy in whom concern for his mother's immortal soul had contrived effectively to demolish the incest taboo.

'Do I what?'

'Oh Ma. You know what I mean. Contravene natural law.'

'I don't think it's something you need concern yourself with—your father and I—'

Helena hadn't, in truth, much of an idea how she was going to complete this sentence, but she saw, with horror, that she had started a hare.

'You mean that Pa knows that you—and he doesn't—'

'Well, honestly. Between married people a certain amount of negotiation goes on—tacitly.'

'I would have thought,' he said with a thoroughly ghastly gentleness, 'that mortal sin was the one thing that was pretty much non-negotiable.'

'Oh, darling, now I think you're being rather silly.'

He flushed a very unbecoming shade of watered claret, and clenched his fists.

'It's—it's—not—'

'Look, I didn't mean to be patronising, my dear. I do see this is something you care very much about—and it is probably wise to give it some consideration—I mean on your own behalf—before very much longer—'

'What on earth do you mean?'

Helena pursed her lips and endeavoured unsuccessfully not to roll her eyes.

'It's all right—I know exactly what—and whom—you mean. And I think it's fairly unremittingly beastly, as it happens. I think I'll go and have a bath now, if you don't mind. Good night, Mother.'

Gracious, Helena thought, letting out a long sigh: talk about _exit, lugging guts_. Her essential nature was not one inclined, however, to prolonged introspection. She made herself a pink gin and smoked a Turkish cigarette from the sandalwood box. Then she crossed quickly to the bureau and took out an old address book and her writing case. Marcel and Solange were really more Anthony's friends than hers, but when the education of the heir to Mariot Chase was at stake, a mother had certain incontrovertible obligations.

**Author's Note:**

> Looking for something else entirely, I ran across [ this comment-fic](http://naraht.dreamwidth.org/568478.html?thread=6049182#cmt6049182) I'd written a couple of months ago. In its original version I had Helena converting upon her marriage, which is somewhat (though not entirely) incompatible with her mention in _The Attic Term_ of a convent-school education. But in any case, I thought I'd rewrite slightly to ensure canon-compliancy. Some readers may recognise an echo of another novel in Helena's school experience.
> 
>  ~~I'm imagining _The Attic Term_ to be set in the late 1960s, shortly after the relaxation of the obligation for Catholics to fast on Fridays, rather at than the publication of 1976. This gives Patrick a birthdate in the early 1950s. Helena and Anthony's tacit arrangement presumably obliges her to continue with a pantomime of the two-cigarettes-and-a-brandy-length preparation for sex even after oral contraceptives have become widely available.~~ This won't answer, as Liadnan points out below. This fic is set in the elastic period known as Since the War.


End file.
